Top 3 things I learned about life and photography in my first week of blogging

   My effort to capture beauty with my camera and post it on this blog has already been challenged, primarily by real life. However, already I have learned a couple of things about 'beauty' and everyday life:

1) When trying to look for beauty in my everyday life, I found it in the little things. A drop of dew, a flower, a bird. To neatly wrap it up in a cliche, it's really the little things that count.

2) You have to get off the couch and out of the house to experience beauty. Admittedly this blog is about finding beauty in everyday life, which right now for me revolves around my kids and house cleaning, but I found that getting out of the house and driving five minutes (or a bit more) out of my home opened up a lot of opportunities to appreciate life around me. Last week I took the kids to the aquarium, on a trail walk and to an amazing botanical garden. And our lives were enhanced with beauty because of it.

3) Creativity and imagination can transform everyday things into masterpieces. From a flower that looks like a couture gown, to a kitchen bowl and food coloring that looks like an abstract painting, imagination rocks!

Now for the technical lessons:
1) All the highlights in my images are overblown, there is zero image data there, any suggestions on how to fix that?
My first instinct is to deliberately underexpose, or set my exposure off the brightest point and then correct it on Photoshop. That is what I will work on next week.
  
    And now for today's photo, it is one from the botanical garden. Although I didn't take the photo today, I did work on it on Photoshop today. Photoshop is definitely a skill that an aspiring photographer needs to master!

My 'Alice into Wonderland.' Photo by Antonieta Rico.

The following  steps were done on photoshop (not in order):
De-saturation
Brightness contrast
Burn
Photo Filter
and
Levels

ENJOY!